Malaga,
It was not an exclusively Spanish issue: the 1980s brought in a general way a claim of pictorial practice as a means of communication between artist and public, although, if in the international are Reaffirming above all the sensual experience that his contemplation was able to raise, from a hedonistic attitude and outside ideologies.
The Carmen Thyssen Museum of Malaga gathers, from this month of April and until September, about twenty representative artists of that phase above all vital of the painting, focusing on its figurative aspect – in recent years, the least analyzed in the exhibition panorama – in the sample “Liberated paint. Young Spanish figuration of the eighties”. It includes about thirty works that, in their aesthetic diversity, share lit palettes, distant themes of political criticism, once democracy, desire for expressiveness and, in most cases, large formats, which would have to do with the desire to deploy without narrow realities and new concerns.
Among those twenty names we will find creators already active in the seventies (such as Gordillo, Arroyo or the Skirt Madrileños Carlos Franco, Carlos Alcolea, Pérez Villalta, Chema Cobo, Manolo Quejido or Herminio Molero) and others that joined in the eighties to a plural pictorial panorama, from personal languages (Ferrán García Sevilla, Miquel Barceló, Antón Patiño, Menchu Lamas, Patricia Gadea or Juan Ugalde). Although Andalusia was the region of origin of many of them, Madrid of the movement will be the destiny of the majority in its eagerness to participate in a new moment for painting, in which a priori there would not have more rules than the individual, the playful and frivolous disciples.
They begin the route of the Arroyo and Gordillo exhibition, as representatives of a narrative painting in gestation since the previous decade that, especially in the case of Sevillian, would reveal emblem of the one made in the eighties as colorful, dreamlike and markedly subjective. Nor can the figuration of the eighties be understood without the work in the previous decade of those mentioned Skirt From Madrid, whose production responded to the debate on the intellectualization of the artistic fact or that of the consideration of painting as a high culture. For its projection in time, Pérez Villalta stands out among them, whose fabrics offer a nuanced Mediterranean light, a unique notion of classicity and a very relevant treatment of architectural elements (derived from their first formation as an architect), from narration and optical resources.
Rich and irony tones will populate the creations of Alcolea, architect of illusionist spaces of calculated ambiguity, while Carlos Franco developed a particular taste for the deformation of his motives and his allegorization, and Chema Cobo deepened the possibilities of perspective games and distortion. The brilliant tones, the result of its primal conception of painting as intuitive joy, would be part of Juan Antonio Aguirre’s language, Alfonso Albacete and another architect, Navarro Baldeweg, also present in this proposal of the Thyssen Malaga.
An own course, recently explored by the Reina Sofía Museum, was adopted by Miguel Ángel Campano, first from informalist postulates, as a follower of José Guerrero and, after passing through Paris in the seventies, from an austere, almost severe figuration, which summarized classic references of French influence and those of contemporary gestural painting. Alfredo Alcaín adds irony to the whole: Malaga has reached their taxes to the dead nature of Cézanne made with acidic, saturated, and even embroidered colors in Petit-Point. Although some grade below in its sarcasm, the colorist pop of María Luisa Sanz continues to take the language of the comic and that of Roy Lichtenstein as referents –chema Cobo and Pérez Villalta would also observe carefully to Hockney, Hamilton or Katz-.
“Liberated Painting” are also part of Joaquín de Molina, a follower of the footprints of neo -expressionism after passing through Germany; Alfonso Albacete, an eminently Mediterranean painter whose style sprouted abstraction to distance himself after her; Alfonso Fraile and his explorations in the subconscious; Pepe Supply, who also went through Paris before settle in Seville and collaborate in the magazine Figure and in the activities of the Gallery the Spanish Machine, and Fernández Lacomba, linked to the Juana de Aizpuru gallery in its first headquarters in the Andalusian capital.
Beyond the Madrid and Andalusian contexts, in interrelation, “painting liberated” integrates in their speech the Mallorquines Ferrán García Sevilla and Miquel Barceló; The first practically linked images and signs in a kind of collages radicals; The second defended a primitivist aspect of figurative painting and reached its consolidation from its participation in Kassel’s document in 1982 and the individual exhibition that starred in 1985 at the Velázquez Palace of Retiro. The Galicians Antón Patiño and Menchu Lamas, then very young, joined the expressionist and conceptual will in works of living tones and schematic figures; Synthesis and miscegenation are also the substrate of the creations of Patricia Gadea and Juan Ugalde.
It allows this exhibition, in short, to appreciate affinities and distances between artists that, at least for a few years, seemed to enjoy the great engine of its creation.
“Liberated paint. Young Spanish figuration of the eighties”
Carmen Thyssen Museum
Plaza Carmen Thyssen
C/ Company, 10
Malaga
From April 1 to September 14, 2025
